Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Want this sent to your email each week? Sign up here, free.)

Name-dropped today: Sam Presti, David Ellison, Otro Capital, Brett Yormark, Trinity Rodman, Stuart Scott, Tyrese Haliburton, Paul Pogba, Brandon Dwyer, UNLV and more. Let’s go:

Driving the Conversation

What makes a great front office?

All year, my colleagues across The Athletic’s coverage of the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB have been talking with every front office in the Big Four, gathering votes and candid insights, to create the definitive front-office rankings in each of those leagues. This year’s leaders:

⚾ MLB: Los Angeles Dodgers

🏈 NFL: Philadelphia Eagles

🏒 NHL: Florida Panthers

Sensing a theme? Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between winning championships and being the most respected (and perhaps envied?) front office.

That makes today’s 2025 NBA front-office rankings reveal more of an affirmation: The Oklahoma City Thunder are No. 1.

Why? Defending NBA champions, owners of the league’s best record this season (an absurd 23-1) and (even more absurdly) in line to secure a cornucopia of first-round picks in the near future, thanks to precisely the kind of savvy deal-making and asset management by top executive Sam Presti and his team over the past decade-plus, all of which has put them at the top of this NBA list for the second straight year.

One exec summed it up: “The best-ever job of acquiring future assets while dominating in the present. Usually, those two are a little exclusive.”

Given OKC’s small market size, relative to other leagues’ leading front offices, is it simply an outlier? Or is there reasonable hope that your own team — no matter its market size, but with the right management — can finally accelerate out of frustrating mediocrity and into Thunder-like vibes?

That is a consistent tension across all our front-office rankings. Free-flowing capital helps, obviously, but in the absence of smart management, it’s not nearly enough.

Coming next week, as part of MoneyCall’s milestone 50th-edition spectacular: Your chance to pick the top front office from all four leagues. Can’t wait for that.

Get Caught Up

Utah’s private equity foray, plus WBD x Netflix latest

Big talkers from the sports business industry:

University of Utah athletics crosses private equity rubicon: The school’s trustees agreed to pursue a groundbreaking deal with private equity firm Otro Capital, which in exchange for an equity stake will inject funding into a new, for-profit university athletics revenue-maximization company, with the potential to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to power the Big 12 school’s athletics program (and the PE firm’s investor returns, a slightly more challenging bar).

The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery: Netflix has an $83 billion acquisition deal in place, albeit just for WBD’s studios business and HBO Max, not the TNT Sports portfolio or other beleaguered cable assets.

Spurned by WBD picking Netflix, Paramount CEO David Ellison is taking a bid to WBD shareholders to buy the entire company, which has enough valuable sports rights to turn Paramount and CBS Sports into a real rival to ESPN.

It is the media drama of the moment, and — given the regulatory hurdles in place for either acquisition scenario — President Donald Trump is expected to play a role, which is an X-factor. Netflix sounds bullish, and I wouldn’t bet against it in this deal.

2026 World Cup draw, considered: As expected, it was a spectacle. Slightly less expectedly, it was interminable. And as hoped for, it delivered some very compelling matchups that will transcend the gaudy, gauche, louche event last Friday and create the sports event of the year in 2026 in the U.S.

College football’s Playoff snafu: I’m here for a Power 4 commissioner (the Big 12’s Brett Yormark) criticizing Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua’s “egregious” criticism of ACC commissioner Jim Phillips. The eccentricities of college football never disappoint.

MJ vs. NASCAR trial update: On the stand yesterday was NASCAR chairman and CEO Jim France, the final witness called by Jordan’s legal team.

Trinity Rodman vs. NWSL: Coming off arguably its most successful season ever — including its most-watched championship game ever — the NWSL has the Washington Spirit “cautiously optimistic” about keeping one of the league’s top stars.

NHL player poll: Another signature reporting feature of The Athletic is each of the Big Four leagues’ anonymous player polls, which always yield fascinating results, including player attitudes around business-adjacent topics. Three of note in the NHL’s 2025 version, polling 120 players, that just came out:

🧾 Do state income taxes matter? (YES.)
📱 Are players using social media burner accounts?
🤕 Who has the most punchable face?

Other current obsessions: Brooklyn’s first women’s sports bar … Tyrese Haliburton as an NBA TV analyst … the Winter Olympic dreams of Philippines men’s curling … Paul Pogba x pro camel racing … the NFL’s Monday Night “Monsters, Inc.” …

What I’m Wondering

Celebrating Stuart Scott

Tonight, ESPN will premiere a new “30 for 30” documentary, “Boo-Yah,” on the life and legacy of beloved SportsCenter anchor Stuart Scott, who was taken by cancer in 2015 when he was just 49.

For older fans, the doc will be a reminder of a great talent lost far too early. For younger fans, it will be a lesson. The film’s premiere has had me wondering:

Among so many highlights in Scott’s legacy, what stands out? Producer Andre Gaines talked with our Zach Powell, and said something really profound:

“We kind of take for granted that authenticity and being yourself and speaking your truth are the types of things that we expect from our television personalities. But that really wasn’t the case when Stuart was first starting out, and it was something that he ushered into existence.”

(9 p.m. ET, ESPN)

Grab Bag

Investment: $401 million
Can Michigan State become the new Texas Tech? The jaw-dropping donation of nearly half a billion dollars will certainly not hurt. (It also underscores that — more than ever — college sports is entirely about money you can throw against your teams. The challenge for MSU: finding its own version of Texas Tech football GM James Blanchard.)

Ratings Watch: 18.3 million
That’s the average number of viewers who watched Indiana topple Ohio State last Saturday, the most-watched Big Ten championship game ever. Fox ended up with the top three most-watched games of the season (all involving Ohio State), but ESPN/ABC dominated the top-20 list with its weekly SEC triple-headers.

Name to Know: Brandon Dwyer
The DI walk-on was a viral sensation for his “Road to 1 point” social media videos, but his first-person account of his story is outstanding. He mentions his coach preaching, “Be a star in your role,” and Dwyer lived it.

Sponsorship: UNLV x Acesso
Sponsor logos on college jerseys are coming.*

*If you ignore the longstanding apparel-maker logos, conference patches and NCAA patches, which all absolutely qualify as sponsor patches themselves and have been accepted for decades.

Peak of the Week: Over-apologizing
Sorry for getting too personal, but I can totally relate to my colleague Elise Devlin. Let’s all work on this together!

Beat Dan in Connections: Sports Edition
Today: Puzzle No. 443
Dan’s time: 00:27
Try it out here!

Worth Your Time

Inside Panini’s “weird” sales pitch as it battles Fanatics for the future of sports cards.

Two more:

(1) The inside story on how the World Cup schedule was produced.

(2) Cannot recommend more our comprehensive city guides for the 2026 World Cup. Essential for any traveling you might be planning to attend games next summer.

Back next Wednesday! Text your colleagues this link so they can get MoneyCall every Wednesday for free. And check out The Athletic’s other newsletters, too.